Given the opportunity to do so while presenting his draft 2025 operating budget to council on Thursday, Cornwall Fire Services Chief Matthew Stephenson pulled no punches in discussing an alarming trend in the city.
“We are tracking horribly on residents not having working smoke alarms. It’s sickening to attend fires, do inspections, and (residences) do not have operational smoke alarms,” Stephenson said in the midst of questions around his request to hire an additional fire-prevention officer. “We’ve laid… in the realm of 50 to 100 tickets over past months for non-operational smoke alarms.”
The commentary echoed a recent release from Cornwall Fire Services following a residential fire where there were missing / inoperable smoke alarms.
While Coun. Claude McIntosh seemed OK to characterize this as either due to absentee landlords or poor tenant behaviour, it suggested only landlords can be held responsible for ensuring residential units have the number of working smoke alarms required by building and fire codes.
While landlords have a legal responsibility to ensure all their residential units have working smoke alarms on every storey, keeping them in working order is a shared responsibility, Deputy Chief Leighton Woods explained. A tenant is legally responsible for keeping the smoke alarm in working order, and notifying the landlord if the alarm is not working.
Homeowners are responsible for both having the alarms in place, and keeping them in working order.
Stephenson acknowledged it’s a challenge identified by many fire services that’s not inherently unique to Cornwall, but has come to the fore due to the six residential fires in the city since the start of October, one of which had a fatality.
“It’s all of our responsibility,” Woods said. “The chief is passionate about this, so am I, so is Deputy (Chief Addison) Pelkey. In our sast fire, we issued numerous charges for non-working smoke alarms.
“It’s sickening, we need to do better.”
Wood explained that after any residential fire, through an after-the-fire program, fire-prevention officers and firefighters will knock on a minimum of 50 doors on the Saturday following the incident to speak with residents and provide public education on having working alarms.
“We tell them, ‘there was a fire in your neighbourhood; it could have been you,'” Woods explained. “We talk to them about having a fire-escape plan in place, we look for signs of hoarding, and smoke alarms.”
In recent months, this means firefighters have knocked on 435 doors, and installed 100 alarms— the fire services use the combination smoke and carbon monoxide alarms recently provided to the city through a partnership with Enbridge Gas.